About

This blog is maintained by me, Thomas Roth, a hobbyist genealogist and GIS user. It brings together a few prime interests of mine, namely the intersection of history and geography in the form of historic atlases, GIS (geographical information systems) with the associated data crunching, map making and last but not least the history of my own family.

Back in mid-2011 I had just finished compiling my parents’ family tree for their 70th birthday when I was approached by a very distant relative. He had researched and compiled over 6’000 individuals of the Swiss Bührer (usually modified to Buhrer/Buehrer in English), which happens to be my mother’s family. We exchanged data and after first import into my MacFamilyTree software the software’s map feature prompted me for the idea for this and follow-on projects: making a map of the emigration of Bührers from Switzerland to the United States.

4 thoughts on “About”

This is fascinating work that you have done – impressive. My grandmother was Helen Buhrer, the granddaughter of Andrew D. from Bibern. I’ve begun to do a bit of genealogy with an aim to find some living relatives in Switzerland. I currently live in London, England so it is very easy for my to fly down to do a bit of research myself. Do you have any contacts in Switzerland that might be helpful? Any information would be most appreciated.

This is FABULOUS stuff! I just started using QGIS and was looking for some genealogical connection. You’ve inspired me to press on! Along those lines, do you know if there are GIS layers for census and/or townships? I have a bunch of family that lived in an area with shifting county lines. I’d like to do a map of the census districts and how they fall within the counties.

You might be aware of the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (http://publications.newberry.org/ahcbp/), but I haven’t come across a similar thing for census districts or townships. https://www.nhgis.org in theory should have something, since they map census data from districts to ‘moving’ counties.

I’m currently redoing parts of my project with roughly double the data/persons and will also look out for township gis data for selected counties like Fulton or Williams County in Ohio.